Managing employee compensation plans has traditionally been done manually on spreadsheets or in-house developed applications. For large organizations, compensation plans are typically complex, involve rewards such as commissions, bonuses, splits, accelerators, draws, caps, etc. and are notoriously difficult to maintain and manage accurately. Target agreements (also called objective agreements) play an important role in modern staff management in conjunction with assessment systems. As a rule, target agreements are used within the framework of a consultation, promotion or annual interview, in which a senior person works together with an employee or a staffer (i.e., a member of staff) or colleague to set qualitative and quantitative goals which will be looked at on a one-off basis or at regular intervals (generally at yearly or half-yearly intervals, but according to recent experience at more frequent intervals) to check the extent to which the goals have been achieved. In the case of performance-related pay, an incentive payment will be made depending on the targets achieved. Obviously, this principle can also be applied to agreements between a client and a contractor, e.g., with a contractor acting on the basis of a consultancy agreement or the like.
There are already computer programs in existence for the computer-aided management and calculation of commission on the basis of input target amounts in accordance with an agreement and input actual amounts which are input after examining the degree to which targets have been met. Thus, the known computer programs are solutions in which a number of target agreements are run separately or independently of one another. In other words, known systems merely automatically perform the steps which had previously been done on paper by the parties involved in the target agreement (generally the management and employees). However, there exists a need for a more accurate target agreement system in view of complex plans to be kept, which in the prior art results in organizations and enterprises wasting money by overpaying their staff as the existing systems are not able to keep accurate track of the complex plans underlying the target agreements.